She reached the little hall in the suburban road in good time and sat in a forward row staring at the little platform where presently the educative voice would be standing. She was conscious of a stirring and buzzing all about her that had been absent in the London hall. The first series of lectures had not brought any sense of an audience. Here the many audible centres of culture, the eager discussions and sudden incisive remarks, the triumphant intensity on the faces of some of the women caught as she glanced now and then fearfully about, the curious happy briskness of the men, made her feel that the lecturer was superfluous. All these people were the cultured refined kind who did not trouble much about their clothes. There were no furs to be seen; the women wore large rather ugly coats or ulsters or capes and bashed muddly looking hats and had mufflers or long scarves. In the London audience herself and her clothes had been invisible, here they were just right, a sort of hall-mark. In her black dress with her clumsy golf-cape thrown back from her shoulders, her weather-worn felt hat softened perhaps to harmony with her head in the soft light she could perhaps pass for a cultured person. _Bianchi_ and _Neri_ whispered her neighbour eagerly in the midst of a long sentence addressed to a girl at her side. She was an Englishwoman. But her mind was so at home in the Middle Ages that she spoke the names and used the Italian pronunciation without a touch of pedantry, and as eagerly and interestedly as anyone else might say "they're engaged!" The clergyman in the row in front would drawl out the words with an unctuous suggestion of superior knowledge. He would use them to crush someone. Most of the men present were a little like that, using their knowledge like a code or a weapon. But the women were really interested in it, they were like people who had climbed a hill and were eagerly intent on what they could see on the other side. It was refreshing and also in some way comforting to be with them. They represented something in life that was going to increase. Perhaps it would increase too much; they seemed so headlong and unaware of anything else. Did she want a world made up of women like this? If she spoke to them they would assume she was one of themselves and look busily at her with unseeing eyes, fixed only on all the things they thought about, until they perceived that she was a fraud. Long intercourse with them might make her able to talk like they did, but never to think in the way they did. Never to have the extraordinary busy assured appearance presented by their persons when you could not see their eager faces; a look that made them seem to be going very fast in some direction that completely satisfied them, so that if a fire broke out behind them suddenly they would regard it not as an adventure that might have been expected but as an annoying interruption, like tripping over a stone....